Review: Retrieving the scholarly past

SHORT biographical sketches of 58 women scholars, mostly American, born
between the 1830s and the 1930s make up this book. American anthropology
evolved separately and distinctively from its British counterpart based
in sociology, be coming an encompassing term for a range of subdisciplines
– notably archaeology, linguistics and physical as well as cultural anthropology.
So for British readers, the term anthropologist may cause some confusion.
This wider range of concerns is reflected in the choice of subjects, who
represent all branches of American anthropology.

Each chapter gives a brief account of a woman’s life, by a different
author, and contains a bibliography listing key works by the subject, co-authored
publications and works which discuss the subject or her oeuvre. There are
appendices giving fieldwork L locations and a chronology of births. Aisha
Khan has written an introduction.

The young anthropologists, in training or recently graduated, who edited
the book write that it is a product of their dissatisfaction with the invisibility
of women in the history and practice of the discipline. They see the book
primarily as a resource for undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology.
There is also, however, an analytical agenda, laid out in Khan’s short but
sensitive introduction. She raises a number of pertinent issues about the
place and role of female anthropologists in the field, the academy and in
public life, asking how gender has mediated professional experience, access
and recognition.

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The editors have clearly tried to ensure that this agenda is taken up
in each of the chapters. This has limitations as well as advantages. The
attempt to read back a contemporary feminist agenda onto scholars as diverse
as Erminnie Smith, an upper- middle-class woman born in 1836, who became
a geologist and later a student of Native American languages, and Ella Deloria,
a Native American (Sioux) anthropologist born on a Dakota reservation 50
years later, makes for rather dubious historiography. It also leads to non
sequiturs such as the comment on the Australian L anthropologist Catherine
Berndt (born in 1918) that ‘she did not come into anthropology as a militant
feminist’.

One advantage is that the multiplicity of forms of discrimination experienced
by women in the profession became visible. Eleanor Leacock recalls that
in 1940 female students were told by their head of department that if they
wanted to be anthropologists they had better have independent means as they
would never get jobs. Dorothy Keur (born in 1904) had to struggle against
parental disapproval to attend college, where, ‘as L Professor Burgess’s
prize student, she was delegated to carry a bowl of soup each noon from
the lunchroom to his office’. Later, Burgess offered her a job as a laboratory
assistant on condition that she return half of her salary to him each month
so that he could purchase Indian artefacts for the college.

Theodora Kroeber, for example, married her teacher, who was a well-known
anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, but she was an important scholar in her
own right. However, a fellow student recalls her as ‘an attractive widow’
who became ‘the perfect anthropologist’s wife’. Few women obtained tenured
academic posts. Some obtained no academic jobs at all. Ruth Landes was blacklisted
by the academic establishment for the best part of her working life after
a slanderous letter alleged that she had paid her Brazilian male informants
to have sex with her in exchange for information. She was 56 when finally
offered a teaching post. The high number of women who worked in government
bureaucracies reflects their academic exclusion.

Not surprisingly, most of the subjects did come from relatively privileged
backgrounds that enabled them to benefit more easily from the rapid growth
of college education in the late 19th and early 20th century. The four Afro-American
women featured in the volume are the main exceptions. Coming from poor or
modest families, they appear to have made their way through a fierce and
single-minded L commitment to education. Like their white counterparts,
however, their professional careers ultimately depended on the encouragement
of a (usually) male patron. Franz Boas, arguably the founder of modern American
anthropology, figures frequently in this role. Consistent with his liberal
and humanitarian principles, he considered that two classes of people, Jews
and women, needed positive redress.

This book will probably appeal to its intended readership of American
college students. It will, inevitably, be of less interest to British students
and to a wider lay audience. Purposely idiosyncratic in its choice of subjects,
it cannot serve as a comprehensive work of reference. Without some knowledge
of the history of American anthropology, many of the biographies will not
be very meaningful. Historians will find the account too short and schematic.
The bland and uniform style of writing and L presentation limits its literary
appeal. Nonetheless, this book makes clear that the study of anthropology
has engaged some remarkably independent, courageous and refreshingly eccentric
women.

Hilary Standing is in the School of African and Asian Studies, University
of Sussex.